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Miniature Swarm of "Robotic Plankton" Mimics Ocean Life

Underwater robots developed by researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego offer scientists a remarkable new tool to study ocean currents and the tiny creatures they transport. Swarms of these underwater robots helped answer some basic questions about the most abundant life forms in the ocean - plankton. The scientists designed and built the miniature autonomous underwater explorers, or M-AUEs, to study small-scale environmental processes taking place in the ocean. The ocean-probing instruments are equipped with temperature and other sensors to measure the surrounding ocean conditions while the robots 'swim' up and down to maintain a constant depth by adjusting their buoyancy. The experiment helped the researchers confirm that free-floating plankton can use the physical dynamics of the ocean - in this case internal waves - to increase their concentrations to congregate into swarms to fulfill their fundamental life needs.

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    Transcript

    00:00:03 I'm Jules Jaffe I'm a research oceanographer here at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. It turned out that there was a really ideal application to building small autonomous robots that can adjust their buoyancy, migrate up and down in the water column, and that was to study plankton: the three-dimensional fields of ocean currents and how plankton get pushed

    00:00:32 around by those currents. I'm Professor Peter Franks I am a biological oceanographer here at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. One of the really interesting manifestations of physical biological interactions in the ocean are red tides. Red tides are really dense aggregations of a particular organism that has grown to these huge concentrations. And often when you see

    00:00:57 red tides you'll see they form stripes in the ocean that are parallel to the shore. About 20 years ago I came up with the mathematical theories that said that if these organisms swim in a particular way they'll interact with these huge waves inside the ocean called internal waves. I wanted to try and test this hypothesis but to do that you have to actually track the individual plankton

    00:01:18 in the ocean and there's no means to do that. And so I have this wonderful colleague here Jules Jaffe and Jules invents instruments to look at the ocean. And he came to me and he said well what if we build sort of a robotic plankton I said "Wow that'd be great!" But one plankton is not going to do what I need I need a whole bunch of them so that I can actually test this hypothesis.

    00:01:37 This is what we came up with ultimately it's a as we described a grapefruit-sized autonomous robot. It has the capability of adjusting its buoyancy. When it comes to the surface it can call us via satellite and give us its gps location so we can go pick it up it's got bright light and it's got a radio frequency kinda like your garage changer that lets us know where it is.

    00:02:04 Inside it's got a computer, on the bottom here we've got a buoyancy control that means just a piston that goes in and out and also temperature and pressure, we want to know how deep we are. We would like to know what the temperature is around us because that's one of the things that we measure. So we deployed this a swarm of 16 of these M-AUEs in the ocean. The acoustic hydrophones allows us

    00:02:32 to get continuous localizations of these little AUEs underwater. This was the first time we've been able to test this hypothesis below the surface of the ocean where you can't see these things, you can't track them optically. It was fairly shocking and pleasing to find that the patterns of patch formation and dispersion of this swarm of robot looked exactly like the theory predicted. And so

    00:03:09 now I think we have a much deeper understanding of how the physics of the ocean interacts with the swimming organisms to create these kinds of patches of organisms in the ocean. There's so many things that you can do with this. We could use them to listen to whales and dolphins, track oil spills. One of the things that came up in the gulf of Mexico where is the oil going? We didn't

    00:03:30 have autonomous floats. So the great thing about what I do that I love is that we can build something in a reasonable amount of time for a reasonable amount of money that will lead to really interesting discoveries about what's happening in the ocean.